The Poe Shadow

by Matthew Pearl

  “Poe again! Now, what has this to do with him?”

  “A great deal! You see, Auguste Duponte is the model for the character of C. Auguste Dupin. That is why he has come. To resolve the mystery of the death of Poe. He has been living in my house and has busied himself at his labor; that is why he has not been seen very much at all. Not to mention he walks mostly in the evening—well, Poe’s Frenchman does the same. In the meantime, the Baron Claude Dupin has pretended he is also the model of Dupin, as well as imitating Duponte.”

  Officer White put his hand up to stop me. “You are implying Duponte is Dupin.”

  “Yes! Well, it is much more complicated than that, isn’t it? The Baron Dupin is trying to be C. Auguste Dupin. The important point is simply to find the man before he comes to harm.”

  “Perhaps, if I may suggest, you have simply seen this one fellow, Dupin, and mistaken him for someone else.”

  “Mistaken him…” I said, reading his meaning. “I have not imagined the entire existence of Auguste Duponte, sir. I have not imagined someone living and supping and shaving in my house!”

  White shook his head and looked to the floor.

  I went on in a deep and serious tone. “Dupin is the wire-puller of this. He must be stopped at all costs! He is dangerous, Officer White! He has kidnapped a rare genius and may have already brought him to injury. He will spread his false version of events behind Poe’s death. Does none of that concern you?”

  It clearly did not; and there was nothing to do for the moment but keep on doggedly with my search.

  I wondered what might have been had I been more aware of human malice in those days. Had I been able to posit the dismal, secret plans—had I known to stay near Duponte at all times, to carry him bodily to the lecture hall if necessary. For all of Duponte’s strengths, he could do nothing faced with the Baron and Bonjour threatening his life, and I pictured him, as described by my domestic, accompanying them without even a struggle. What it would have meant to Poe’s legacy for Duponte to have spoken on this night. But such a question is pure speculation.

  The time for the lecture was growing near. Walking with a rueful air along that street, for I wished to brood at the appropriate site, I was startled to see a throng of people pushing into the entrance of the lyceum hall. I touched the arm of one of the men on line and asked him the occasion.

  “Haven’t the lyceum organizers canceled the lecture tonight?”

  “No such thing!”

  “This is the lecture that has been planned, you mean to say? On the true death of Poe?”

  “Of course!” he said. “Perhaps you thought Emerson had come to town.”

  “Duponte,” I breathed. “Has he escaped after all? He has come?”

  “Only,” the man interjected, “there has been a change of circumstances. They now must charge for each ticket of admission.”

  “Impossible!”

  He nodded with resignation. “No matter. It is the original ‘Dupin,’ you know. It is worth one dollar and a half.”

  I stared at him. He proudly held up a copy of Poe’s tales. “It is bound to be something,” he said.

  Running to the front of the mob, I shoved my way inside, past the objecting doorkeeper asking for my ticket.

  There, behind the stage, sat the erect figure of Auguste Duponte, quietly waiting alone in contemplation. I looked on with renewed faith and triumph, and reverence.

  “How—?” I stepped closer.

  “Welcome,” he said, glancing up at me deviously, and then looking around as though waiting for something more important. “I am glad, Brother Quentin, you will be a witness to history.”

  It was not Duponte.

  As remarkable as his imitation of Duponte had been at earlier times, the metamorphosis was now terrifyingly complete. Even the eyes contained something of Duponte’s spirit.

  “Baron! I will not let this come off, be sure of that.” I gripped my Malacca in front of me.

  “And what will you do?” His gaze fell leisurely over me. “You and Duponte have done me a favor, you know. I already have collected the subscription fees from my lecture to be held in a few days, and will receive those from today as well.”

  I was surprised, once my mind adjusted to the circumstance, to find no trace of Bonjour around him. Would the Baron leave himself so unprotected? I suppose someone had to guard Duponte, unless they had…no, not even the Baron. Not an unarmed man.

  “I will tell you the truth, the real truth, Brother Quentin. There were times before this day when I thought the jig was up. That Duponte was too clever for me. I see by your face you can hardly believe it. Yes, I thought, by the bye, he would by some measure prevail. He has lost his last chance, and now he may lie down and die.”

  “Where is he?” I demanded. “What have you done to him?”

  The Baron wore a devilish grin. “What do you mean?”

  “I shall have the police on you! You shall not escape this!” I decided to try for any ace of information from him, and to loosen his confidence besides. “You know, wherever you have him, however you are holding him, Duponte will find a way out. He will come for you like all wrath. He will stop you at the last moment; he will prevail.”

  The Baron offered an intimate laugh. He revealed nothing, but his insecurity showed in a twitch of his lip. “Monsieur Clark, do you know the obstacles I have overcome to reach this day? The Baltimore police pose no problem to me. Today, I turn a corner. Today it is do or die to put a finale on all this. Unless you shall stop me, for you are the only one who can now—no, but clearly you will not. I shall no longer live in the shadows, not in the shadows of my enemies or of Auguste Duponte. There are times when genius, like Duponte’s, must doff its hat to cunning. This day shall be my passport back to glory.”

  The Baron followed the lyceum director onto the platform and to the podium. I looked around desperately, trying to think of what to do, but found myself on a mental treadmill. Finally, I pushed forward onto the platform and attempted to at least divide the Baron from the podium. Then I saw the crowd—no, call it the mob, the endless, formless, hollering expanse of people’s stares—and I understood why the Baron did not need Bonjour at his side to be protected. He was safe in a crowd. He was about to become legitimate again in the eyes of the world.

  In the background, a lyceum clerk was fixing a light, causing it to sway disruptively, further confusing my senses in the dark hall. I could only shout for the lecture to be stopped and heard moans of displeasure in response.

  I had lost all ability to articulate, all flow of logic. I shouted something about justice. I pulled and prodded, and was pushed in return. At some point in the fog of my memory, I can see there was the face of Tindley, the Whig doorkeeper, standing out in the crowd. A red parasol twirled in the horizon of my sight. I saw faces: Henry Herring, Peter Stuart, who pushed past the anxious crowd to come closer to the front. The old clerk from the athenaeum was there, too, squeezed into his seat, and newspaper editors from all the chief offices of the press. Sometime in all this, in the wavering light I saw it—the grin, the razor-sharp peculiar grin of mischief that Duponte had held for Von Dantker, now precisely plagiarized upon the face of the Baron. Then there was the noise, the only noise that could have risen above the excited clamor that my disturbance had now provoked. It was like a cannon burst. The first sent the stage lights crashing to the ground, drowning the whole place in darkness. And then there was another.

  I jumped back amid the sea of screams and feminine shrieks at the sounds of gunfire. I trembled with a sudden chill, and from some macabre instinct put my hand to my chest. I remember only fragments after that:

  The Baron Dupin above me and both of us falling together in a bloody tangle, upending the podium in the process…his shirt stained with a wide oval, the rim of which was a thick darkness the color of death…he groaning, gripping madly, passionately at my collar…a horrid weight over my body.

  Then, both of us sinking, sinking into oblivion.
/>   Book V

  THE FLOOD

  I feel like one

  Who treads alone

  Some banquet hall deserted

  —THOMAS MOORE

  26

  I WAS NOT suspicious when Officer White took me in his coach from the lyceum to Glen Eliza. Think of it. I had more knowledge of the complex situation that had just occurred than anyone. Though I did not have unreserved confidence in the abilities of the police officers, I believed that with my assistance, Duponte could be found…and then he would find the truth the Baltimore police could not.

  Officer White entered the drawing room of Glen Eliza with his clerk and several other police officers I had not seen before. I proceeded to transfer to White all the knowledge I possessed—from the arrival of Baron Dupin in Baltimore to the violent moment as I had just witnessed it. But from his interjections, I began to wonder how closely he was listening.

  “Dupin is dying,” White kept repeating with different emphasis. “Dupin is dying.”

  “Yes, at the hands of these two rascals,” I explained once more, “who pursued me through the city earlier, thinking I was trying to prevent their petty vengeance against the Baron.”

  “Then you saw one of them shoot the Baron at the lyceum?” asked Officer White, who sat at the edge of an armchair. The police clerk was all the while standing dumbly behind me. I never liked feeling watched, and I looked back repeatedly with an unsubtle desire that he would at least be seated.

  “No,” I answered the officer, “I couldn’t see anything from the stage, with the glare of the lights shining and then going off, and that mob of people. A few faces…But it is most obvious, it had to be their deed.”

  “These two rascals you mention—names?”

  “I do not know. One of them nearly did me in the day before. I was shot through the hat! He would be injured, no doubt, from our struggle, as I managed to cut him. I do not know their names.”

  “Tell me what you do know, Mr. Clark.” The police officer had a distant tone.

  “That they were French, that is most certain. Baron Dupin was in great debt. A Parisian creditor will never quit his harassment and dunning—even as far as Baltimore.” I did not know if this was true of all Parisian creditors, but thought it best under the circumstances to make an axiom of it.

  To this, Officer White merely bobbed his head as one would do to a rambling child.

  “Claude Dupin had to be stopped—for the sake of Poe,” he said.

  I was surprised at this turn in the conversation. “Precisely,” I replied.

  “You told me earlier he had to be stopped—‘at all costs.’”

  “Indeed, Officer.” I hesitated then began again. “Yes, you see, what I meant…”

  “He was certainly laid out awful flat,” commented the clerk from behind my chair, “Dupin was. Flat as a hog barbecued.”

  “A hog barbecued, sir?” I asked.

  “Mr. Clark,” Officer White continued, “you wished to choke off his speaking at the lyceum. You told me as much beforehand when you came looking for your French friend.”

  “Yes…”

  “That portrait you passed along to us, signed by one Von Dantker, was of the Baron. It shows him to a hair. Why had you commissioned a portrait of him?”

  “No, it was not the same man! I did not commission anything!”

  “Clark, you may gas and blow all you have a mind to later, but no more fables today! It is said that the Baron had precisely the same fantastic smile upon his face right before being shot as the one shown in this portrait! Unusual smile!”

  My skin grew warm, my body sensing danger before I could think about what was happening. I halted when I noticed my shirt stained with the Baron’s blood. Then I realized that my servants were shuffling around nervously in the corridors, away from their posts. The three or four police officers who had come with Officer White were nowhere to be seen in the room—and other policemen were now parading through the room, enough to constitute a standing army. I could hear footsteps ascending the stairs and moving in the bedrooms above. Glen Eliza was being searched even as I sat there. I felt as if the walls were sinking around me, and the image of Dr. Brooks’s burning house came into my mind.

  “You grabbed the Baron, even as he began to address the audience—”

  “Officer! What do you mean to say?” We were talking over each other now.

  “No one could account for your presence—and there is no trace of your friend, this ‘Mr. Duponte,’ anywhere.”

  “Officer, you are implying something…you may call me a story-teller if you like…!”

  “…Poe has done you in once and for all.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “Your obsessive dalliances with Mr. Poe’s writings, Mr. Clark. You would have done anything to stop Baron Dupin talking of Poe, wouldn’t you? You have admitted you assaulted and ‘cut’ another Frenchman. You wished only for yourself to talk of Poe and nobody else. If someone indeed was involved with Mr. Poe’s death, I wonder if that person would have exhibited signs of preoccupation with it—it’s leading me to wonder about your own activities at the time Edgar Poe died.”

  As I strenuously objected, the police clerk came around and took my arm, asking in calm tones that I stand up and not struggle.

  27

  AT FIRST I was held in one of the cells across from Officer White’s private rooms in the Middle District station house. At the sound of every footstep there rose in me a semi-desperate expectation. Imprisonment, I might interrupt myself to say, does not merely produce a feeling of being alone. Your entire history of loneliness returns to you piece by piece, until the cell is a castle of your mental misery. The memories of solitude flood over all other thoughts of the present or the future. You are only yourself. That is the world; no poet of the penal system could devise anything harsher than that.

  Whom did I await with palpitating breast? Duponte? Hattie? Perhaps the sour but stalwart expression on the face of Peter Stuart? The Baron Dupin himself, escorted by the doctors, able to bear witness to the real culprit who shot him and to free me? I longed even for the clamor of my great-aunt’s voice. Anything to remind me that there was another person concerned by my fate.

  There was no word about Duponte, meanwhile. I feared for him an outcome worse than my own. I had failed him. Failed in my role to protect him in the operation of his genius.

  Officer White circulated a selection of passable newspapers and journals as part of the jail liberties for the prisoners who were literate. I accepted them, but only pretended to read them while, in fact, I went about far more important reading, which I had smuggled in with me. When I had wrestled at the lyceum with the Baron Dupin, I had semi-consciously removed from his hands the notes he had brought for his speech. Hardly thinking of their significance, I had thrust these papers into my coat before accompanying Officer White to the station house.

  As long as I had candlelight in my cell, I studied them, propped in a magazine. Edgar Poe has not left, but has been taken away, said the Baron’s treatise. It was not on the whole inelegant, though at no time aspiring to literary merit. As I read, I committed it to memory. I thought of Duponte reading over my shoulder. Only through observing that which is mistaken can we come to the truth.

  One time while studying these pages, I was interrupted by the approach of a visitor. The slouching figure of a man came into the hall, escorted by the clerk. It was a man unknown to me, wearing an expressionless face. He leaned his umbrella on the wall and shook off the excess water from his gigantic boots, which seemed to take up half his height.

  “The stink in here…” he said to himself, sniffing.

  A woman sang drunkenly from the ladies’ cells corridor. The visitor merely stood silently. Not finding any particular look of sympathy about him, I did the same.

  I was surprised when the stranger was joined by a frightened young lady, wrapped tightly in her cloak.

  “Oh, dear Quentin, look at where th
ey’ve put you!” Hattie stared pityingly at me. She was near tears.

  “Hattie!” I reached out and grabbed her by the hand. It hardly seemed possible that she was real, even with the warm leather of her gloves. Taking renewed notice of the stranger, I released her hands. “Is Peter not with you?”

  “No, he would not hear of me coming. He will not speak of the situation at all. When he went to the lecture, he was quite angered, Quentin. He felt he had to do something to try to stop you. I do believe he is still your friend.”

  “He must know I am innocent! How could I have something to do with the shooting of the Baron? The Baron had kidnapped my friend to prevent him from speaking—”

  “Your friend? Would that be the friend who has placed you into this débâcle, Mr. Clark?” said the man standing at Hattie’s side, turning toward me with a frown not unlike Peter’s.

  Hattie motioned him for patience. She turned back to me. “This is my cousin’s husband, Quentin. One of the finest attorneys in Washington in this sort of matter. He can help us, I’m certain.”

  Despite the despair of what was now my lot, I felt comfort at the word “us.”

  “And the Baron himself?” I asked.

  “He lies without hope of recovery,” my new lawyer blurted out.

  “I have written to your great-aunt for her to come at once; she shall help rectify all this,” Hattie continued, as though not having heard the terrible words. If what her cousin said was true, if the Baron was shortly to die, in the eyes of the world I would be condemned as a murderer.

  A few days later I was moved from the district station house to the Jail of Baltimore City and County, on the banks of Jones Falls. The atmosphere duplicated my hopelessness; the surrounding cells were filled to capacity with some who’d been convicted of grave crimes along with those waiting, with small hopes, for their trial dates, or with perverse eagerness for their own hangings.